


Talk to Shooting Stars

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Series: I'm Peter, I'm 19 and I Never Learned to Read [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Background Ned Leeds/Peter Parker - Freeform, Bombing, Character Study, Deaf Character, Deaf Harley Keener, Gen, Harley Keener & Peter Parker Friendship, Harley Keener Needs a Hug, Harley Keener Whump, Hospitals, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Panic Attacks, Peter Parker is a Good Bro, Tony Stark Acting as Harley Keener's Parental Figure, and my love for tony and peter and harley's family all being there for him, this is 17k of me word vomiting about my own deaf experience onto harley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-02-24 00:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23833573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: Harley gulps. "You know how Dr. Carp said I only had brain damage to the right side of my noggin from the impact?"Peter nods. He knows where this is going--he's sharp as a whip, and he's filled with ice in his veins, with something not quite fear but its close cousin, unnamed and dreadful and strangling."Well, she was right. I did. And that's how I lost my hearin' in that side of my head. But the other--the, the left--" Harley swallows. He rips up a blade of grass and twists it around his fingertip.Peter moves briefly to pinch the bridge of his nose. Then he unfurls himself a little, scooting closer, only just daring to brush a knuckle over the wet knee of Harley's jeans. "When did you lose your hearing in the left one, Harley?"Harley's mouth falls open and his jaw pushes to the side. Peter knows that mannerism, he knows that look, because he's done it a thousand times before, in front of Ned or May or Tony or MJ, when he's trying not to cry and all he can do to keep himself together is stretch the tension in his body as taut as it will go."When I was seven," says Harley, and he deserves all the fucking Oscars in the world for how evenly his voice comes out.
Relationships: Harley Keener & Peter Parker, Harley Keener & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: I'm Peter, I'm 19 and I Never Learned to Read [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1394110
Comments: 30
Kudos: 120





	Talk to Shooting Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [floweryfran](https://archiveofourown.org/users/floweryfran/gifts).



> *rolls up on a tiny bedazzled tricycle* what's up potatoes. This is officially me projecting all my experiences being Deaf onto Harley Keener because I already made Peter trans in this series and, well, I can't project all my hurt and trauma onto a single boi :)) Had to spread the pain around :)))
> 
> No for real though, this is based on my own journey to acceptance of being Deaf. I lost majority of my hearing when I was assaulted when I was around 14, so like Harley in this story, I wasn't born into the Deaf community, much less involved in it. To this day I haven't met many Deaf people, either. I'd like to insert the necessary disclaimer here that different Deaf people will have very diverse experiences with their deafness, and so my take on Harley is only meant to represent one possible perspective.
> 
> Theme song and title inspiration: ["Anyone" by Demi Lovato](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW3aJ-3SEVU)  
> Song I listened to on repeat while writing this because I am a masochist: ["Hey There, Delilah" (cover) by Talia Lahoud](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAMM6vbiFpM)
> 
> Dedicated to floweryfran because she has been my rock rooting me throughout this entire project. You know how personal this piece is to me, Fran, and I'm so touched at the love and excitement you showed me at every step of the process. I'm so glad we got to meet and bond over our mutual love for Harley Keener and our beautiful relationship just sprouted from there.
> 
> Tw for brief implied suicide mention, which takes place between the lines "Black holes" and "Stop, stop, stop, kid!" Stay safe!!

“I don’t care what anyone says, lemon ginger tea smells like froot loops,” Peter gripes over the steady _thwip-thwip_ of his webs. The wind cuts in and out of his audio feed as he swings to the nearest rooftop, settling on the concrete in a crouch to catch his breath.

“I don’t know what the hell typa tea you’ve been drinking, but if it’s some of Tony’s Rich People Shit, no wonder you’re so traumatized,” says Harley. He’s in his room in the Tower, kicking his feet up in the air like he’s cycling upside down on top of his bed. He adjusts his do-it-yourself headset to pick up Peter’s voice from the comms better.

“I just--lemon and ginger and tea are not words that belong together.”

“Excuse me?” Harley scoffs. “Lipton, though?”

“That’s different,” Peter protests. He huffs as he lowers his legs over the edge of the roof and swings them back and forth, thousands of feet above the crawling traffic below. “Lipton is like--a piece of childhood. And it’s _iced_ tea. Plus, it’s powdered. We ate questionable things when we were kids, and they taste like absolute shit now, yeah, but we don’t talk about it.”

Harley hums at him with a grin. 

The comms crackle and whine as Ned logs on. “Hi, hi, hello,” he huffs out. “Am I late?”

“Pete’s getting shat on by pigeons on top of the Daily Bugle,” Harley says, with a remarkable flatness to his voice considering his heinous imagination. “Or something.”

“Or something,” Peter protests. “The pigeons love me. Hi, babe.” He directs the last bit toward Ned.

“Okay, good, because the last time you came crawling through my window with bird poop all over your suit, I had to do a _lot_ of explaining to Ma ’bout why I was suddenly all gung ho about using the washing machine at ten o’clock at night.”

“Why didn’t he just bring it home?” Harley interjects. “Is May’s donkey laugh that bad?”

“Hey!” Peter admonishes him. “May’s donkey laugh is the single most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard in your entire _life_ , Harls. And no. It’s because Ned has this broken machine in his building that you don’t have to put quarters in to use.”

Harley fist pumps the air as if the other two boys could even see him. “Down with the capitalist patriarchy.”

“I’m picking up some, uh, some weird activity on this--like, three blocks from you,” Ned cuts in, apparently squinting at whatever satellite feed he has connected to his PC.

“Oh, yup, yeah, I see it. Please don’t be a kitten-napper, please don’t be a kitten-napper...” There’s a rustle and Peter’s voice is momentarily muffled as he yanks the lower half of his mask back over his mouth and takes off.

“I’m bored,” Harley complains, as he and Ned listen to the rhythmic _thwip-thwip_ of their resident Spidey swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper.

“Get on Discord and show me the last thing you did in Animal Crossing,” Ned suggests.

Harley whoops half-heartedly as he grows tired of his imaginary upside-down cycling and lowers his legs back down to the bed. He sits up, bones creaking, his head a mass of sandy tufts and dandruff. “Yow,” he says, popping his jaw and adjusting the headset again. “Yeah, okay--sure. But I mean, like, my _body_ is bored. I’ve been sittin’ here on my ass in bed for the better part of the day and I keep reminding myself that, like, it’s either this or go back to school and go boo-hooing down the hallways again ’cause we all know I’m best friends with Depresso Expresso.”

“Saddy McSad,” Peter concurs, sounding distracted.

“Maybe we need to go out more,” Ned laments. “It’s summer vacay and we’re all here, like, _the_ ultimate nerds.”

“I’m at least half a jock,” Peter points out.

“Your other persona is,” Ned corrects him. “You, on the other hand…seriously, bro, you’ve gotta know you held the title for Most Likely to Faint During Sit-Ups for three years straight in middle school.”

“Yuck,” Harley pronounces with a wrinkle of his nose. “I just imagined myself doing half a sit-up. Ew, ew, ew.”

“Seconded,” Peter says. He lands somewhere with a pant. “Hey, buddy! Yeah, you. Cool shades! You know what ain’t cool? That poor old lady’s wallet in your hand. Seriously, man, purple crocodile print? Just not your color.” _Thwip-thwip, thwip-thwip_. A muffled yell, an affronted sound more than anything else, really, followed by more scuffling noises and Peter’s jaunty whistle as he presumably retrieves the stolen wallet.

“Like, I love physical activity,” Peter switches back to the conversation at hand. “Making it compulsory and graded, though? Not cool.”

“Thanks for that scintillating opinion, MJ,” Ned deadpans. Harley snorts so hard that he can taste the Campbell’s soup he downed for lunch coming up his nose.

“Let’s go out,” Harley cuts in, as he busies his fingers sending Ned screenshots of his Animal Crossing island over Discord. “Like actually go out. What about tonight? What time do you get off patrol, Pete?”

Ned snickers. “‘What time does he get off’?”

“Guys, this is my _profession_ ,” Peter whines. “Um, maybe another hour? I’m starving, to be honest.”

“Cool beans.” Harley punches his pillow. “I’ll just...slither off my bed in a couple minutes and catch a ride down to wherever you are. What do y’all wanna eat? Pizza?”

They quibble over sushi, pad thai and even falafel but in the end somehow circle back to pizza, as they always do. Harley is halfway to the elevator when he’s intercepted by Tony, who’s munching on a donut at six in the evening over his fifth cup of black coffee and who definitely has his glasses on upside-down.

“How,” Harley says, clucking his tongue and stopping Tony to right his glasses. “I don’t understand. How does that even happen.”

Tony points to the headset around the boy’s ears. “Did you hack into Karen again? You hacked into Karen again.”

“Why ask me when you obviously know everything with your infinite and boundless genius?”

“Well, that’s a backhanded compliment if ever I heard one,” the man says mildly. He breaks the last mouthful of donut into two pieces and shoves one into Harley’s hand. “Where are you headed?”

“Gonna have dinner with Pete and his boyf,” Harley says around the donut. “It’s my regularly scheduled third-wheeling. Want anything?”

“Peace and quiet? A good night’s rest? Ah! A cure-all for my PTSD.”

Harley rolls him a flat look. “Sure. I’ll be sure to top it with pepperoni.”

“You’re a darlin’,” Tony calls after him, in a mockery of Harley’s patented drawl, as the boy steps into the elevator. “See ya later, kiddo. Be careful how you go.”

“Same.” Harley tosses him a smirk and a three-fingered wave as the elevator doors close between them.

\--

In hindsight, Harley should have known the day was going too well for nothing to go wrong.

He knows this: it’s a principle pounded into him by years spent in Rose Hill, in a little house of old wood and stained windows where walking the wrong way on the floorboards or coming through the back door at the wrong moment could turn his entire evening into pain and screaming and floating and wrong, wrong, _wrong_.

But he got comfortable. He met Tony and he slipped into the man’s life, into the man’s home. He glimpsed the warmly painted walls like peanut shells in his room and the yellow curtains around the window, and he started to believe he was safe.

He should have known that this curse-- _his_ curse, whatever the hell this is--will follow him wherever he goes. Whoever he is.

He’s in the middle of humming “Hey Delilah” to the other two boys over the comms, because they’ve told him repeatedly that he has a good voice and he knows it; he just never wants Tony to be around to hear him actually singing--he’s humming, entertaining them and getting lost in the feel of the melody for once, when he catches sight of Peter from a distance about a block and a half away and he hears the boom.

He stops. His brain and the rest of his body take a while to catch up, the hum dying belatedly in his throat. He squints.

There’s a pause, that grace period when he’s allowed to think this isn’t real, that maybe his brain glitched. And then he’s yelling, everyone’s yelling, it’s all noise and noise and everything all at once.

“Peter!” he screams. His body lurches and moves of its own accord. He’s sprinting, crashing into people as they flee in the opposite direction. He can’t move fast enough to get to Peter. He yells, “Peter! _Peter_!” again and again, and he thinks he glimpses Pete’s wide eyes and fluff of brown hair, but he can’t be sure.

“Harley!”

There he is. _There he is_.

“Pete, what’s goin’ on!”

“I--” The other boy crashes into him, and Harley stumbles back and grips Pete’s elbows to steady him. “I, I, my Spidey sense, it was going off, but I didn’t see anything, there were too many people and then--and I saw him running out too late, I gotta go after him, oh, God, Ned, where’s Ned? Is he here yet?”

“No! I don’t--I dunno, I don’t think so!” Harley pants. His panic is rising in his mouth to match the wild look in Peter’s eyes. 

“I gotta catch him, Harls, stay here, okay, stay _here_ \--” Peter starts to take off, but Harley grabs him by the sleeve of his denim jacket with all the strength in his skinny arms.

“Wait wait wait! No! I’m comin’ with you, c’mon, Pete, you ain’t even got your mask on! We can’t--you just--”

“Stop, lemme go, Harley, please, we don’t have time for this!” Peter shakes himself free of Harley’s grip. “Go get Ned! Call him! I--I gotta go!”

Chaos filters back through Harley’s senses as he stands there on the sidewalk and Peter tears away from him to zip around the corner. More people are pouring out of the shops, the offices. Children cry in bewilderment. Harley stumbles when another wave of the crowd floods over him.

His stomach has dropped to his toes. He doesn’t know how or why he knows this, but Peter is in danger. He knows. He just does. He doesn’t have time to question when he sprouted a newfangled Spidey sense of his own, because the next thing he knows, he’s broken out into a dead sprint in the direction that Peter disappeared.

Danger, danger--

Peter may have super strength, but apparently when Harley is being strangled by sheer terror he can bolt like a gazelle. In less than a minute he gains on Pete and sees the other boy less than a block ahead, yelling at the masked man in black to get down and turn himself in.

The man whirls on them with a fury and desperation that tastes like blood and salt in the air. He has a pistol and he’s holding it out at Peter, he’s pointing it, pointing it at _Peter_.

“We don’t want trouble,” Peter says. From close behind him, Harley marvels at the steadiness in his voice. He doesn’t know what he expected, but he knows from what Peter’s told him that the Spidey mask helps him a great deal to slide into the persona of a man.

The tip of the thug’s gun wiggles between the two teens. “Oh, yeah? Then what’s a bunch of nosy kids doing back here? Piss off. Go on. You heard what I said. Imma shoot, I tell you, don’t come closer or I’ll shoot. Fuck off!”

“Nobody needs to get shot,” says Peter. “C’mon, man, don’t do this. We just--where is it? Where’d you plant the other one?”

The man’s eyes widen infinitesimally behind his mask. “Plant what? Plant what?”

Peter inhales. “You planted a bomb back there. I know you planted another one in the other building, I saw you running out the back door, just tell me where it is and I bet there’s time, we can still get the people out--” His gaze flickers to the side at Harley, and for a fraction of a second he lets his guard down, and Harley sees a flash of sheer panic there in his eyes where it doesn’t belong.

The man starts screaming. “I’ll shoot you! I swear to God, fuck, I’m gonna shoot, don’t you even fucking come near me! I’ll shoot!”

Peter says something else. It comes out garbled to Harley. He has his hands out in front of him, they both do, and Peter is babbling something to placate the guy, but something’s wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

“Peter, Peter,” Harley gasps out, not even caring that he said the boy’s name in front of the goon, because he feels like he’s gonna puke.

Peter’s eyes bulge and his face goes ashen as he turns at the sound of Harley’s voice and stares at something over his shoulder. They both feel the tremor beneath their feet--a figment of their imagination, perhaps, or a fantasmic warning from the earth--and then Peter’s yelling himself hoarse, wordless, painful. Harley feels himself knocked back clean off his feet before his brain registers the blast or the heat. 

Then there’s asphalt, and more heat, and something almost feels like it’s melting inside his skull. He smells burning concrete.

He’s on his back, somehow. Almost everything hurts--he’s like a thumb freshly crushed by a hammer--

 _Harley, Harley_ , there’s a face mouthing it in his field of vision. Peter? That’s Peter. He’s crying. His teeth look so small, Harley thinks, and as he comes to that realization it never even occurs to him that he can’t hear a thing. All there is around him is the darkness lapping at the edges of his consciousness and the incessant keening in his ears.

“Go get ’im,” he chokes out. His throat is dust. “Get ’im. Get ’im.”

And then he comes untethered and he drifts.

\--

Harley remembers when he was twelve and Charlize was nine and they were at the park in Rose Hill. He was standing on the swing set, and Charlie was jumping up and down on one end of a seesaw that wouldn’t budge, when Tanner Bush from school came sauntering over and said they looked like a bunch of orphaned monkeys.

Words routinely glanced off Harley’s shoulder and fell to the ground. But Tanner was looking at Charlie when he said it, and his mouth was curled up ever so smugly, that Harley couldn’t help but feel that the little fucker wasn’t talking about Harley at all, he was talking about Charlie, his sister, his _sister_ , and fuck it, that wouldn’t fly.

He went for a punch without thinking. He missed wildly in his rage and Tanner went wide-eyed. He pushed back on instinct, but Charlie threw herself between the two boys, only to bear the full brunt of Tanner’s shove and fall to the ground with her head smacking against the iron foot of the swing set.

Harley remembers yelling. Hoarse and guttural, too loud, probably, too animalistic for the circumstances, by the way Tanner swayed back on his feet and went white as cotton. Harley remembers he was standing one moment and then on his knees the next. Mouth open. Breathing felt ugly. Ugly, like--like how Peter probably felt kneeling over him when the building blasted and Harley got knocked back into the asphalt like an apple core.

“Charlie, Charlie,” he remembers chanting over and over under his breath. Cursing himself for not knowing how to feel for a pulse--how did one feel for a pulse? 

She opened her eyes not even a second after his freakout was just starting to build up. “Harley, Harley,” she croaked back at him, eyes teasing, obviously pulling out that joke again about how their names freaking rhymed.

“What’s--what happened? Your head? Did you hurt it? How’re ya feelin’?”

“Like God played hopscotch on my skull,” she blurted out. And Harley laughed. He laughed, because he’s a bastard, and so is his sister, but the worst bastard of them all was Tanner Bush, who had backed away from them both and taken off stumbling in the direction of his momma’s mini van parked on the other side of the post office.

It became a thing. Not a frequent one, but enough that every other year or so, when Harley dislocated his knee or Charlie squished her left hand between the back door and the lintel, and one bandaged the other and asked how they were feeling, the boy would grin roguishly through tears and mutter through his teeth: “Like God played hopscotch with my damn kneecaps,” or the girl would roll her eyes and press the back of her other hand against her eyelids and hiss, “Like God played hopscotch on my fuckin’ knuckles.”

She was twelve when she said that. Harley should have admonished her, but instead he doubled over laughing over the kitchen sink.

So when Harley drags open his eyes to the stab of grayish light and the keening of machines in his ears, and Tony scrambles to attention from where he’s slumped in the ugly sage green hospital chair at his bedside and says--“Hey, hey, bud, you’re awake! Wow. Uh. How ya feeling?”--the only thing Harley can think of to do is start tearing up and mumble, “Like God played hopscotch on my freaking brain.”

Tony gapes at him. He has every right to.

The man looks like shit. The last time Harley saw him over a donut and caffeine, there were bags under his eyes, and now he looks like he has two actual bruises ringing round them. 

Tony continues to stare at him, all ruffled hair and rumpled AC/DC tee and coffee breath, and then bursts out into a titter. A high-pitched giggle, crazed, incredulous. He deserves it, really, after what Harley just put him through.

“You’re in the hospital,” Tony chokes out. He sounds like he’s three seconds away from crying, now. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“What happened.” Harley’s tongue feels like lead. There’s a pounding in his head, and ringing, a ringing that won’t go away even when he drags his free hand up to knead his forehead. Tony’s voice seems to cut in and out. He squints, trying to focus on the man.

“Pete said the blast knocked you back across the street," the man is saying. "And your head--it just went--bam. Slammed into a manhole cover."

Harley's vision swims. Nothing feels right, almost like Tony's superimposed on the background of the hospital chair in front of him. Like this is one of those hyperrealistic dreams that turn into his usual subconscious motifs of drowning.

It takes forever for his auditory processing to catch up with him, and then some for him to find the nerves to move his tongue. "That would explain the sledgehammer in my skull."

Tony gives him another funny look. "You and Pete really do have a talent for the understatement, don't you? I--Jesus Christ."

Harley doesn't have the strength to argue, much less to point out with his usual snark just where he thinks he and Pete got that from in the first place. Instead, Harley lies there cataloging his surroundings, every limb and nerve ending he can sift out from this sensory hell and this--this overwhelming nausea of _not real_. He wiggles his fingers at his sides and feels the line of pain from his sprained wrist shoot straight up to his shoulder. His back--something is definitely numb there, on fire behind the curtain of meds. Legs present. Weak, but there. He flops his feet clumsily inward and outward and watches the movement make ripples under the surface of the marshmallow-colored blanket on top of him.

Then Peter walks in looking like a marionette in a sweatshirt pulled on inside out, both hands filled with paper cups of shitty hospital coffee, and Harley is seized by the overwhelming need to puke.

Peter still looks half-asleep as he slams the coffee cups on the dresser, lunges for the sick bag hanging on the knob and shoves it under Harley's chin.

Spidey sense.

Harley is shaking and numb and shaking again and--drenched with disgusting sweat, moisture all over his face, salty and pathetic, as he empties the contents of his stomach. Is he crying? He's fucking crying.

"Sorry," he mouths. Nothing comes out. Somebody mops up the lower half of his face with a whole wad of tissues, and all he can think in the haze and the panic is that it's wasteful. Wasteful and _wrong_.

He dashes away the last teardrops from his eyelashes with the back of his free hand. "Thanks," he gasps out. "Geez, I...thank you."

Peter doesn't say anything, just stolidly avoids Tony's gaze from across the hospital bed and continues to wipe down Harley's face. When that gets too awkward for him to do, he looks anywhere but at the two other people in the room, instead drumming his fingers on the bedrail, biting his lip, staring from the corner of his eye at the little quarter-sphere of a mirror installed in the corner of the ceiling at the far end of the room.

For a moment of icy reality, Harley remembers May telling Tony about Peter's episodes of mutism, and he's consumed with an entirely renewed self-loathing. Because he did that. He put that upon Peter, this time, when the other boy had clearly told him to stay back and let him handle the criminal.

 _It's my profession_.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

And that, that of all things, makes Harley break out into a hysterical little laugh.

"Guess that's the last of that soup," he says. His voice rough, like it'll never be the same again.

Tony swears under his breath and leans forward with his elbows on his knees, tenting his palms over his nose. "I can't believe you, Flannels."

Even Peter has swiveled his head to look at Harley incredulously. Something's shining there, beyond the familiar guilt that mirrors Harley's own, and far beyond the pinprick of fear with which he became so acquainted in Peter's eyes that split second before everything exploded.

"I thought you were dead," Peter warbles.

"We thought you were," Tony acquiesces. "Christ, I--I was ready to start praying to every single deity in every canon."

"I'm sorry," Harley says after a beat.

"No, no, that's--stop. That's Peter's word. I can't handle two of you, Lordy." Tony jumps to his feet and starts pacing the linoleum with such momentum that one would think he was never sitting in the first place.

"Tony," Harley says. "Tony. Tony."

"What? What. Does something hurt?"

"I can't--" Harley's nose scrunches. "Could you speak up? You're, like, cutting in and out."

Tony and Peter's gazes swerve around each other and interlock. It tinges the air with that flavor of secret, secret, _wrong_ , and it sends Harley through another wave of nausea.

"What?" says Harley.

"Doc said this might be an...effect," Tony says. The knot in his face speaks of even tighter coils of anxiety inside him.

"Tell me," says Harley. Ringing. His ears are ringing.

"You hit your head pretty hard, kid," Tony goes on.

Harley's not an idiot. After the blast that ripped through the air and whited out everything in his ears like they were stopped up with cotton seconds before his fall, he can put two and two together.

And now he swivels his head to look at Peter, who's picked up his coffee cup and is keeping himself from clenching it so hard that Harley fears its contents will splatter everywhere and drench them with this fucking ocean of guilt that divides them even now.

"It's temporary," Peter says. Breathing loud through his nostrils. "She said--Dr. Carp said--"

"She said it could be," Tony corrects him. 

Harley sinks back down into the pillows behind him. He feels like a nurse should be bustling in right about now, or one of those generical white-coated doctors with the Crest Whitestripped smile and the tired shock of hair after ten hours of delivering bad news to huddled families. Now would be a perfect cinematic moment for that to happen, to really seal the deal, he thinks. Madly. Desperately.

Instead, he sits there in the maddening ringing in his ears, old pain blooming in his skull, and he stares at Tony and Tony stares at Peter and Peter stares at Harley and--this would be the part they cut out of the gag, the part that just gets so awkward that it feels too real.

"This is a dream, right?" Harley feels himself saying. "You--Pete--Tony--this is that, that lucid dream shit. Holy shit, wow. What did they _put_ in that pepperoni."

Peter makes a keening noise in the back of his throat. He stumbles back at the same moment that Tony trips forward with a litany of _no, no, no, buddy, no, I'm here_ on his tongue. The man somehow gets Harley's head wedged against his stomach and his gnarly hands course through his hair. Everything still smells like ash.

And Peter--Peter says something wild, something about May, or the coffee, he doesn't know--and practically bolts to the door.

\--

Dr. Carp isn't bad. She has box braids and she doesn't smile easily, if at all, and for that Harley feels grateful.

The white paper bag she hands him contains a little orange box with the standard issue hearing aids inside. She starts explaining about how there are different models, different types that do different things, different, different--

Harley laughs to himself. He doesn't open the box to even check if they're in there. He glances over at Tony at his side, who quivers with that paradox of horror and hope warring so clearly within him.

"You don't hear out of your left ear, correct?"

Harley snaps the paper bag shut and rolls it up. "Nope. Uh--congenital thing."

Dr. Carp glances pointedly between Harley and Tony, though the movement is almost too fleeting for either to notice. "Uh-huh," she follows up after a beat. "Right. Okay. Noted. Your hearing may continue to fade in and out in your right ear--that's not unusual for this type of hearing loss after a head trauma. Take two of these daily, and we'll do some tests and see how your hearing is after a couple days, 'kay?"

Trauma. Harley tastes the word, lets it settle on his tongue. Refuses to swallow. Logically, he knows it's a perfectly precise word. He's just never heard it uttered in any other context than--well.

"Okay," he says out loud. "I need to call Charlie."

He's always been magnificent at that: keeping an even voice over a gaping pit of nothing inside him.

\--

He has the draft of the text to Charlie pulled up in his messages the entirety of the ride home. He opens and closes the app, swiping between screens, blinking and shifting his gaze lethargically to the window when the words blur and spin in front of him.

His mom and Charlie already know. No doubt the hospital contacted them--at the behest of Tony, or Peter, both of whom don’t know their own social security numbers but could recite the phone numbers of their loved ones at the drop of a hat--and that’s why there is a barrage of texts from his sister in WhatsApp, a flood of voicemails from his mother. Maybe it’s selfish that he chooses to call Charlie before Rose, but he promises himself he’ll phone her right after. What he needs right now--what he’s simply aching for--is to talk to someone just as young and dumb as he is.

The girl picks up the video call before the first ring even ends. Against the grainy pixelation of her figure, Harley can make out the space buns half undone on the top of her head and the faded peach t-shirt with the line of sassy bunnies across the chest in cracked blocks of paint.

She picks up, and she squints at the screen, at him, really, while he stares back at her, suddenly and acutely aware of Tony being unnaturally quiet in the driver’s seat next to him. Brother and sister stare at each other like that for what feels like longer than ten seconds, until Harley finally breaks the silence with a deadpan, “Well, you look like shit.”

“Took the words right outta my mouth,” Charlie says without missing a beat. “How’re ya feeling?”

Harley hedges. “What’d they tell you?”

“There was an explosion, something exploded, and you were with Peter, I know all about it. How are ya feeling?”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Harley says, clearly not answering her question. “They made it sound dramatic.”

Tony’s grip on the steering wheel turns white-knuckled from the corner of his eye. Harley digs around in his hoodie pocket for his earphones and plugs them into the jack on his phone.

“Yeah, and you’re the least dramatic person I know,” Charlie says dryly. “Mr. Macbeth.”

“This is cyber bullying,” Harley complains. This is good. This is--this is safe. Joking is well within that zone he knows like the back of his hand.

Charlie doesn’t rise to the bait. “Ma’s been calling you. You know she’s gonna...ya know. Feel some typa way about you calling me first.”

“Uh-huh. I know.” Harley sighs and drops his head back against the headrest. His skull flares and throbs once, dully. “Could you put her on for me?”

“Want me there or nah?”

Harley doesn’t respond for a moment. They both know that their relationship with each other is wholly different from their relationship with their mother, and where skirting around the issue and tossing jests into the bonfire may work for the two younger Keeners, Rose refuses to beat around the bush when it’s one of her kids that’s hurt.

Charlie reads his answer well enough in the silence and says simply, “I’ll go get her.” She makes to set down the phone on her desk, propped up against the body of her ukulele, most likely, but then she hesitates and whispers into the speaker: “I was...worried.”

Annoyance fills Harley. He can’t fathom why, at first, at least not for a full second. And then he processes the taste of self-loathing, and how he feels all funny and wrong, just like he’s been feeling ever since he woke up in the hospital bed last night and saw Tony all bag-eyed and Peter mute and everyone in the room so fussy over him. He doesn’t deserve this, this care, this tenderness. Not when he was fucking stupid and didn’t do as he was told and practically endangered everyone around him by hampering Pete in front of the criminal and--and--

And nothing. He schools his expression and lets the vestiges of his misdirected irritation bleed into an unwilling warmth. Hopscotch, he thinks. Bloody knuckles and popped kneecaps. Playing with soap suds in the double sink when Ma’s working and they’re supposed to be washing the dishes.

“I’m fine,” he says, more to convince himself than anyone else. It’s useless, of course, because Charlie has known him for sixteen years now and she can read all the black stuff floating around in his brain before he even utters it.

“I was really worried.”

“I know. And I’m sorry.”

“That’s not what you’re supposed to say, you idiot.” Charlie shoves the pads of her fingers up against her eyelids, digging so hard that Harley fears for a second she’s gonna poke holes right into her skull. “Just--gimme a minute,” she breathes. She sinks down, hard, onto the old corduroy cushion tied to her wooden chair.

If Charlie can read Harley like a page from her own book, then so can Harley. The last time he saw her--truly saw her, swung her up in the air shrieking and tickled her as he hugged her--that was at Christmastime, when he came back from first semester of college with his tail between his legs and a new bottle of antidepressants in the pocket of his backpack, and gentle orders from Tony to spend his leave of absence with family.

Charlie’s thinking of that right now, Harley thinks. How long it’s been--how bad of a brother he is, escaping his visions of family disappointment in Rose Hill by holing himself up in Manhattan with a father figure he barely even has the emotional capacity to acknowledge as one. How the last time he saw Charlie, everything wasn’t okay, but they were fine and everybody lived, despite the close call on the rooftop of the parking garage at MIT.

He’s full of close calls. And he needs to fucking put an end to it, for the love of Charlize Keener.

His sister straightens and dashes away the wetness from one side of her cheek with the back of her hand. “I’m good, I’m good,” she says. “Shit, I’m just glad to see you okay, ’kay? Imma go get Ma now. Hang tight.”

Rose gets on not two minutes later, all disheveled braids and blue collared shirt askew. “Where are you? What happened? I thought you were still in the hospital--I’m booking a flight today--”

“No, no, it’s fine, stay there, seriously, Ma, nothing happened.” At Rose’s fiery look, Harley amends, “Nothing too bad. I just got--scraped up a bit. Hit my head, but my head’s fine, see? It’s fine, see? I’m talkin’ to you.”

“Where are you?”

“In Tony’s car.” The boy glances over at Tony. They’ve exited off the highway and are pulled up at a red light off the ramp. The man graces him with a tight little half-smile. His eyes are shielded by the tint of his glasses.

“I didn’t even get to come see you,” Rose laments. “They discharged you that soon?”

“Yeah--yeah. I told you, it’s nothin’ serious. I’ll be right as rain in no time.”

“I’m still comin’ up there.”

“You’ll miss work,” Harley objects. His skin, inexplicably, starts to crawl.

All this attention. All this worry. Unworthy. Deserving. Wrong.

Rose leans forward, tilting Charlie’s phone closer to her face until her nose nearly fills half the screen. “I can’t tell if…”

“Huh?”

His mom moves back from the camera. Her mouth still moves, lagging with the poor wifi connection, and Harley shakes his head. He rips his earphones from the jack. No sound--he can’t--there’s ringing. There it is again, high and keening, together with the muffle of cotton pressed up against his brain. 

His breath quickens before he even realizes it. “Wait--” he manages to get out. “Connection sucks. Lemme, lemme call you back.” He jams his thumb against the red button and he slams his phone face down against his thigh.

Something rumbles. He thinks it’s Tony speaking. Harley swivels his head to the side, and sure enough, the man is turned toward him, shades gone, just his eyes and eyebrow raised in questioning.

Harley shakes his head. And shakes it again, and again, because he can’t breathe. There’s a finger in the center of his chest pressing and pressing down on his sternum, vague and terrifying, and all too present.

The car jerks to a halt. The boy doesn’t register where they are, or even that they’ve stopped, only that Tony is unhooking his seatbelt and leaning over the console with a wide-eyed look. The next thing Harley knows, Tony’s hand comes down on his nape and the other sweeps up to push the hair back from his forehead.

“Sit up, sit up,” Tony mutters. Harley can’t hear him--of course he can’t, goddammit. The doctor had warned this would happen. “Kid. Work with me.” He squeezes the back of Harley’s neck, maybe a little too hard in his panic. But Harley responds to the touch and leans up into it, in the process straightening his torso infinitesimally.

Tony keeps talking, Harley thinks to himself, even though he must know by now that Harley’s having an episode and can’t hear a word he says. He fixes his gaze on Tony and his gestures. He’s exaggerating his breaths and puffing his chest in and out, beckoning to Harley to do the same.

Harley shakes his head. “Can’t.”

Tony sets his jaw. _Yes, you can_ , his mouth says.

And so Harley tries. His eyes hurt and his head hurts. His ears hurt. His everything--everything.

He keeps hauling in air into his unwilling lungs like that by focusing on the pressure at the points of contact between Tony’s fingers and his skin. He thought he would flinch at it, but he welcomes it, craves it, even. And slowly, trembling, Harley’s chest expands and lets in deeper breaths. The twisting of his heart inside him begins to still.

And then Harley slumps over with his head over his knees. Tony’s grip on his nape loosens, unwillingly, it seems, because his fingers linger a bit longer, choosing instead to trail down the upper portion of the center of the boy’s spine. Harley shudders there in the bubble of darkness between his legs. He hasn’t had a panic attack like this since--well. 

No one needs to know the last time he had a panic attack.

Harley presses the heels of his palms into his eyebrows and kneads the skin there. Sound comes filtering in and out of his senses, too quickly for him to process. He feels wrung out and wet and aged.

“You with me now, buddy? Huh?” Tony’s hand continues to rub up and down his back.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m--yeah.” Harley gasps out a breath and swallows convulsively. He peeks up to the side at Tony. For a split second, the emotion in Tony’s eyes is wholly unguarded, and Harley glimpses fear there, not unlike the same glint that was in Peter’s eyes seconds before the building burst into pillars of smoke and Harley went flying.

It disconcerts him. Terrifies him, leaves him unanchored.

Tony moves his hand up to pat the portion of Harley’s cheek he can reach. “How’s the head? How’s the ears?”

“Fine. It’s fine. I can hear you now.”

“I’m sorry, bud. I’m so, so sorry.”

Harley slumps to the side. Tony’s fingers slide up into his hair and stay there where they’re tangled in his hopeless mop. The touch is far more welcome than he will ever admit.

“Not your fault I ran after a psycho with a gun and a bomb,” he mutters.

Tony’s hand pauses in its motion. “No. No, no. It is not your fault that there _was_ a psycho with a gun and a bomb. Oh my--oh my God.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No.”

“I’m _sorry_.”

“This conversation is over unless you stop apologizing,” Tony says, sternness in his voice belied by the little quiver there.

“I just...I wanna go home.”

At that, Tony sits back. Harley doesn’t dare look him fully in the eye. Tony swallows. He reaches this time for his shades perched unfolded on the dashboard, and he slips them on. “Okay,” he says softly over the start of the engine. “Okay, Flannels. We can do that.”

\--

When he wakes the next morning, he can’t hear anything.

It meets him with a terror he’s never been quite acquainted with. He knows fear, all right: he knows the fear of a seven-year-old lying on his back in the carpet of his bedroom, listening for the cacophony of his parents’ voices fade into an electric tension throughout the house, and hearing the unmistakable drag and shuffle of his father’s socks down the hallway, and holding his breath for the pause in the man’s step by his door--that interminable second before the right floorboard squeaks again and his father swivels on his heel and heads back out to the kitchen. He knows the fear of seeing his nine-year-old sister go flying through the air and slam her head against a swingset. He knows the fear of seeing the ghost from their past pick up his mother by the shoulders in the middle of the Jiffy Stop and shake her, ragged, defiant yet white-lipped.

He knows what it tastes like.

It tastes like this--quick breaths, a stone beating between his ribs. His imagination taking flight because it can’t be true.

But the fear that the morning brings with its unforgiving sunrays and cotton in his ears is quite unlike any other. He hears nothing, he hears nothing, he _has_ nothing, not even the fucked up comfort of the tinnitus in his ears from yesterday.

“Go back to sleep,” he says with his mouth. He moves his lips. His chest vibrates, and so does his throat. But he doesn’t hear a thing.

“Go back to sleep. Go back to sleep.”

Everything is unnaturally still, almost disrespectfully so, as the blood pumps through his veins in a torrent of barely restrained panic. His joints are locked in place. The ceiling spins above him.

“Back to sleep. It’s not real. It’s not real. She said it’s not--it’s temporary.”

He closes his eyes, and only then does the bottom of his stomach cave in, because he can neither see nor hear and the spinning is so, so much worse down here in the darkness.

He slams his eyes open again and scrambles for the potted flowers on his nightstand. He barely has a chance to rip out the bouquet before he hurls straight into the vase.

Harley has no idea how much time passes after that. He sits there with the clay vase tucked miserably between his knees, whole body shivering even though it’s fucking July and he’s still in yesterday’s jeans. Vaguely, as if from a distance, he registers himself being sick once more, maybe twice.

And then he crawls off the bedcovers and shuffles to the bathroom. He empties the contents of the vase into the toilet. Rinses the clay thing under the tap, robotically, methodically. Splashes his face. Avoids looking in the mirror at all costs.

There are crescent marks dug into the fleshy hills of his palms when he glances back down at his hands. The pads of his fingers are red, too, like they used to be so many years ago when he would fall asleep with his hands pressed up against his eyelids to stop the tears from flowing so he wouldn’t be puffy for school in the morning.

“Careful,” he utters. He feels the vibrations again--barely--and his hearing is not totally gone, but with the muffling effect of this shroud over his head it’s maddening.

“Careful,” he says again, this time pressing a tentative hand to the front of his throat. “Be careful how you go,” he says. “Be careful how you go. How you go. Be careful how you go.” His Adam’s apple bobs.

“Hi,” he says this time, “I’m Harley.” 

And nobody in that room could tell just when his voice breaks. His hand certainly can’t. Only he can, because he knows the moment he opened his mouth to say his name he’s coming untethered again.

\--

“I’m going home,” Harley says even before he’s rounded the corner of the kitchen on the upper floor where Tony is perched on a bar stool.

The man snaps the magazine in front of him shut. They both know he was never reading it in the first place.

Tony downs his espresso shot and sets the little cup down on the counter with a clink. His finger circles the rim as he looks Harley up and down once, cataloging the haphazard change of clothes and the squeaky clean cheeks and the--off-white hearing aids hooked around his ears.

With his other hand, Tony runs two fingers down the sides of his goatee. He pulls up a bar stool with his foot and gestures to it. “C’mon, come eat. How ya feeling today, kiddo?”

“Okay,” Harley says, without even letting him finish. He grabs a blueberry bagel from the bag and starts slapping down some cream cheese on it.

“Slept okay?”

Harley winces as Tony’s voice comes in at a whine. He fiddles with his left aid as subtly as he can, but his hands aren’t steady--they haven’t been in so long--and he gives up after only managing to unhook it from his ear.

Suddenly Tony’s there, corded hand overlapped with Harley’s. “Here. Let me.”

They work in silence. Slathering cream cheese, adjusting settings. When Tony hands it back, Harley creases his face in a smile of thanks.

“I slept fine,” he lies, approximately two minutes too late to the question. “You?”

“Didn’t sleep much.” Tony steals the plastic knife and licks the rest of the cream cheese off.

“Sorry,” says Harley.

Tony raises a brow at him. “What did we say about that word yesterday in the car?”

“I dunno,” Harley shoots back before he can stop himself, “I was kinda busy not breathing.”

Tony’s jaw pushes to the side as he apparently considers the best way to respond to that. In the end he decides not to. “You and Pete sure have a love affair with guilt.”

“Oh, I wonder why.”

The man’s brow creases. True, Harley’s being particularly acerbic this morning, but they both know his humor lies on the more biting end of the scale to begin with in comparison with Peter’s.

“Speaking of which,” Harley says, “where is he?”

“Webhead? He went home last night. Has a whole ass aunt to live with, y’know. I’m pretty sure he’ll be around later this afternoon.”

“He doesn’t have to bother. I’m fine.”

That seizes Tony’s attention. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m not talkin’ about anything. I’m just saying he doesn’t have to feel obligated. I’m up on my feet and I--well, I talked to my momma yesterday and I wanna go home and visit. I just...y’know. She’d miss work if she had to come out here. So. Anyway, I’m the one in the family who’s a great big bum, so it all works out.”

“Okay,” Tony says, dragging out his syllables. “I’m glad you’re gonna visit ’em. That’s--that’s great. But--you’re not upset at Pete, are you?”

 _Sure. Why not._ After all, it’s always been easier to pretend to be angry at the world rather than admit whom he actually hates to his very core.

Harley’s clipped tone doesn’t help his case. “No.”

“Look, I know he didn’t--say much back at the hospital, you know it must have been a shock and I guarantee you a thousand and seventy percent, he was worried sick out of his mind about you.”

Worried. Always worried. And that’s the problem.

“Well, he doesn’t have to worry about me anymore. I got discharged early, my head actually feels great, I got my--got my hearing thingies plugged in--” Dammit, he still can’t cover the catch in his voice. “And I’m eating Rich People blueberry bagels.”

“They’re mixed berry,” Tony quibbles. “Anyway--not the point. He cares about you. He really does. He’s just...blaming himself. I’m sure you know.”

“Well, he can stop now,” Harley says petulantly. He hops off his stool. “Thanks for the breakfast. And for...everything. I need to go pack now.”

“Harley.”

“Oh, I’ll just grab an OJ, hold on.”

“ _Harley_.”

“Tony. What.” Harley swivels at the corner of the breakfast bar.

“Just--come back and sit here.”

“No, I--I gotta pack. I gotta pack, Tony, I wanna catch an early flight and if I don’t start gettin’ stuff in order now, I’ll freak out and forget stuff, you know, this, I, I, I--lemme pack.”

“Come finish your orange juice over here.”

“Do you fuckin’ want me to cry right now?”

It’s out of Harley’s mouth before he can control himself. He grips the little bottle of orange juice so tight he feels the whiteness spread in his knuckles.

“No. Yes. Wait--I don’t know. Are you crying right now?”

“No,” Harley says, breathing heavily. And then, because he can’t stand another second around Tony beneath this facade: “I’m going back to my room, for real now.”

He bolts from the kitchen as fast as he dares, practically speedwalking down the hallway with his stupid bottle of orange juice squeezed tight in his fist. He lugs his suitcase out from underneath his bed and starts tossing, tossing things in, he’s a neat freak on most days but he needs to keep moving and moving fast if he doesn’t want the dam to break inside him.

He shouldn’t be surprised when Tony raps on the door with his knuckle and clears his throat. Really, he shouldn’t.

Reluctantly, Harley looks over his shoulder.

Tony takes the liberty of coming closer, one hand thrust in the pocket of his jeans and the other gesturing roundly at the absolute mess Harley’s made of his bed. “Not like I don’t love seeing you finally take out all the clothes I bought you last year, but--” The man rubs a thumb against the edge of his goatee. “...Looks to me like you’re packing for a downright apocalypse.”

Harley hadn’t even realized until Tony pointed it out. He snaps the suitcase shut, suddenly flooded with shame over the crumpled mass of fabric and dog-eared books inside. He shoves it back across his bed and turns to face Tony fully, arms folded over his chest. He feels skinny. Defensive. Small.

Because really, what’s the point of packing for just one week when he might as well just walk right out of Tony’s life and leave him better for it?

“Buddy?” Tony prompts him. Eyebrows raised. “Talk to me. C’mon.”

“There’s no point,” Harley says. He draws his shaking hand over his eyes.

“No point to--no point to what? Sorry, kiddo, I’m not a mind reader. You’re gonna have to spell things out for me.”

“I was only staying with you because I got the semester off and it was, it was better to be here if I needed to go back to MIT. To visit Pete ’n’ Ned and--to fuck around on campus or, or absorb school through osmosis or whatever,” says Harley. “Like. It was better. Logistically.”

Tony’s brow knits together, but he doesn’t interrupt the boy’s rambling just yet.

Harley laughs mirthlessly. “Well. I guess that’s off the table now. So I--makes a lot more sense to go back home for good, huh?”

“I’m still not following. How is--all that off the table?”

“Don’t play fucking dumb, Tony,” Harley says, and it’s harsh, it sounds all too old for his nineteen-year-old mouth and his thin, thin shoulders, but it’s the truth. His chest shudders.

Tony stares at him. For the first time since that morning, he truly looks at him, not just at the wrinkled shirt and off-white hearing aids, but at the bitter smile, the nose twitching as Harley sniffs and looks away, the hands tucked up tight against his armpits to show how they don’t shake. The heap of textbooks on the floor next to the garbage bin.

He remembers when he woke up with a cavern in his chest and the taste of pennies in his mouth underground. He remembers glass shards flying around him as Obie smiled down at him, head small like a fucking turtle from inside his gargantuan iron suit on the roof of the tower. He remembers Pepper’s eyes, blue, blue, _blue_ , the only thing he could see against the fire as she hurtled to hell below and he couldn’t put enough fucking power in his thrusters to save her.

He remembers how helpless he was. How helpless he _felt_ , despite being Iron Man and one of the freaking smartest humans on the planet. It didn’t matter, none of it, not his IQ or his money or his merry band of PTSD-stricken superheroes, because when he felt helpless he was as good as paralyzed.

And he remembers the battle of New York, the one memory that clogs up his throat even today and the one that he refuses to put a name to even on his worst nights.

Black holes. This is that. This is like--black holes.

“Just because this happened to you doesn’t mean you can’t go to college,” Tony feels his mouth say. “There’s plenty of ways. Resources. C’mon, Harley, you know this.”

“No, I _don’t_ know this,” Harley snaps. “I couldn’t even handle school when I had all my five senses functioning. I was crying my fucking eyeballs out and throwing books at my wall and--fuckin’ breaking down on rooftops--”

Everything in Tony goes cold. “You--”

“--And I couldn’t pull my shit together back then, when everything was actually goin’ right for me and I didn’t have a _fucking_ reason to be in pieces, so now, so now, what the _fuck_ do I do? Huh? When I can’t even talk to people without getting a migraine from these _stupid_ hearing aids and I feel like everybody’s just about gonna stare a hole in my head and you, you, y’all are walking around on eggshells around me, like I’m some kinda kitten that got beat the shit out of it on the subway or what-fucking-ever--”

“Stop, stop, stop, kid! Stop!” Tony moves to touch him, hug him, maybe, he’s already got his arms half raised, but Harley flinches and stumbles back. The boy slaps the heels of his palms to his eyes.

“Listen to me,” Tony speaks again, lower this time. His head is spinning. “Tons of deaf folks go to college. That’s a fact. Lots of places are accessible to people, MIT of all places, hell, I’ll personally make sure of it. This is not the end of things.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No. This is not the end of your--”

“Yes, it is. I don’t even want to go back to MIT.”

“Oh. Okay. Okay. Right, you mentioned…”

“MIT sucks,” Harley seethes. He doesn’t care if he’s speaking in metaphors or hyperboles anymore. “I hate science, it’s ruined for me, I wanted to--to--to do art, music, theater, all those worthless majors--”

“--They’re not worthless--”

“I wanna make music. I wanna make films. Be on stage. Sing and act and--direct and--make stuff, Tony, _make_ stuff, and I need to hear and I need to be present for shit like that, I need to be able to hear notes and I need to not be spiraling--”

“--You are allowed to spiral, God, Harley, that’s not--and you have time, all the time in--”

“No, _no_ , you don’t _get_ it, everything’s over and I’m going home. I’m a disappointment just like _he_ always said so I might as well--”

“You need to listen to me.”

“It’s where I belong, I don’t deserve to--”

Black holes. Black holes. Tony’s seeing black holes. “Shut up and listen, goddammit!”

“Pick one!” Harley yells back. “Fucking--pick one! Because you know I can’t do fucking both.” His voice cracks. “Not anymore.”

The impact of Harley’s words doesn’t register in either of them until the silence falls between them like the distant shatter of glass.

“I need some air,” Harley whispers, and his voice is wrecked. He looks like paper about ten seconds away from blowing over as he pushes past Tony through the doorway.

And Tony just stands there frozen to the carpet like an idiot, because he’s trying just as hard as the broken kid downstairs to find the strength to breathe. 

\--

“Hey, Pete. I…” Tony sighs, heavy as the sky, and it crackles on the line. “I really screwed the pooch on this one.”

\--

“Help me out here, bud. He’s gotta have some place he likes to go to in the city.” Tony drums his thumbs for the umpteenth time on the steering wheel.

Peter clicks his phone on and off in his lap, as if checking it one more time will make Harley’s location suddenly pop up on his screen when they both know he left the device on his desk back in his room at the Tower.

“We’ve checked the ice cream place and the library and that--really weird boutique he always goes to for antique inspiration,” Peter thinks aloud. “I...can’t think of anywhere else I know he goes to. Geez. God. I’m sorry. I’m trying.”

“Not your fault, Pete. Take a breath.”

“Yeah, well, it kinda is,” Peter says wryly.

“Jesus Christ, why is it always the guilt complex with you kids? Guilt as big as a--freaking space alien.”

“Like Thanos.”

“Distasteful comparison, young buck, but _yes_.”

“Sorry,” Peter says, also for the umpteenth time that evening.

A car honks ahead of them. It’s quickly followed by a chorus of other honks, right down the line, because this is New York and that’s just how things are. Tony eases off the steering wheel and slides off his shades, tossing them onto the dash.

“Look,” he says. “I messed up big time with Harley back there. I pushed and--yeah. I exploded, he exploded, he ran off, I didn’t go after him, now here we are. But maybe I can talk to you, while we’re at it, and maybe I can get through to you. Because y’know...historically...both of you may be stubborn as--geese in Central Park but--you’ve always listened to me. Kinda.”

A quick smile folds across Peter’s face. “Thanks...I guess?”

“So.” Tony clears his throat. “This guilt thing. I know I have it. I’m working on it.”

“By building ten suits for Mrs. Potts?” Peter asks dryly.

“Hey, don’t call a man out when he’s being vulnerable in the middle of Manhattan traffic,” Tony reprimands him gently. “I was talking about therapy. But you? You’re too young for this. I can only imagine what you’re gonna look like when you’re twenty. Christ.”

“That’s only a year from now.”

“Yup. Yeah. And you’ll be gray by then.”

“Ned finds men who are prematurely gray kinda sexy--”

“Right,” Tony mutters. “What made me think two trauma-ridden superheroes with ADHD trapped in a car could have a productive conversation about this.”

Peter softens at that. “Look, Mr. Stark…” He tucks his hands between his thighs and scuffs the heel of his sneaker against the mat. “I know you’re gonna say that there was nothing I could have done differently, but...I felt my Spidey sense even way before the first building blew up and I saw Harley coming down the street. If I had--just--paid more attention, acted faster, followed my gut…”

The light ahead turns green and lets three cars through. Tony lets the car roll forward.

“And then Harley would have been left alone in the chaos and he could’ve still been knocked to the ground. Or worse, stampeded. There just wasn’t enough time, Pete. You guys were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“No, no, I was in the right place,” Peter says, with newfound urgency to his tone. “Tony, this is--this is my _job_.”

“But you’re human too,” Tony says. “You...you always forget that.”

Peter’s eyes sting. He turns away to face the window. He hears the splat of the rain before he registers the droplet hit the glass and slide down.

“Shit,” Tony says under his breath. “Don’t freaking tell me he’s out there in this rain.”

“Wait!” Peter shouts suddenly, making them both jump. “Sorry. Uh. I just remembered. That park where they did that one awful version of _Midsummer Night’s Dream_? Last year? Remember--”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!” Tony says. “Right. Gosh. We’re idiots. Let’s go. C’mon, folks, gas up.” And he joins the next obnoxious round of honking.

\--

They find him, small and shadow-like, hunched over himself as he trudges away from them under the shelter of a line of trees.

Tony calls out to him first. Harley doesn’t pause in his step, and Tony and Peter exchange a look that says he just might have torn off his hearing aids to shut out the world.

Peter jogs ahead through the rain and reaches Harley in no time. He hesitates, not knowing exactly what to do, but then lightly taps Harley’s shoulder.

The other boy stiffens. His head turns to the side, almost knowingly, because he expected this all along, really, for Tony to come after him in this whole dramatic setup of summer rain. But when he turns fully and registers Peter standing there in front of him, hair flattened and bangs plastered to his forehead, looking like a buff seaweed in his nerdy t-shirt that clings to him, Harley stops and stares.

“Hi,” Peter says softly. “Hey.”

Harley stares and stares. He doesn’t even seem to realize how Tony’s figure vibrates in anxiety behind Peter, hands behind his back.

“Come home with us,” Peter says. “We’ll--we’ll get you to Tennessee in no time. But--first, you need some chicken nuggets.”

And Peter scoops up Harley’s hand, frozen and pale, and slots his fingers against his brother’s.

\--

When Peter and Harley are standing three days later on the curb outside the tiny airport in Tennessee, backpacks over their shoulders and Harley leaning against his brick of a suitcase, Harley says suddenly: “I should probably warn you about Charlie.”

“Huh?”

“She’s--oh, speak of the devil.”

A faded red pickup pulls up in front of them with an unintentional screech. Two women get out, the brunette one hopping down in a blur of braids and wispy skirts and three-inch platform combat boots.

One minute she’s at the car door and the next she’s throwing herself in Harley’s arms. Harley’s face melts of its own accord into a full laugh, surprised but willing, and it’s the first time Peter has seen anything remotely genuine on his brother’s visage since--well.

Peter stands there and he stares, as Harley picks Charlie up off her feet and swings her around, bashing her foot into the suitcase on the ground because they’re young and they’re fools.

Yup. Yeah. Peter has the distinct thought that Charlie looks like she’d get right along with MJ, and that should probably terrify him just a little bit.

Harley’s mother, Rose, approaches her kids slowly and taps Harley on the shoulder. Peter’s seen her before, but she is looking far more radiant than the first time they met at the police precinct some years ago.

“Hey, Momma,” Harley breathes, and he scoops Rose up right into his arms even as he’s still holding onto Charlie. “I love you. Hi. I missed you.”

“C’mere,” Rose says to Peter over Harley’s shoulder. She beckons him with a bejeweled hand. Peter pauses for a second longer, but Charlie shoots out a hand to grab him and haul him into the impromptu group hug.

“Oh, wow, okay, um--geez--this is, this is nice.”

Rose finally pulls away with a throaty laugh. Her blonde hair is in braids too, just like her daughter’s. Her smile is just a tinge of tired, but far more relieved than anything else, and brighter than it’s ever been in a surprised sort of way, as if life has just been breathed anew into her. She pushes up the sleeve of her humongous denim jacket over her elbow and steers Harley into the passenger seat.

“You’re riding in the back with me,” Charlie says to Peter in a no-nonsense voice. She grabs Harley’s suitcase and flings it into the quilt-lined bed of the truck faster than Peter can say _super strength_.

“Amazing,” Peter babbles. “I’m not--I’m not scared of country highways or, like, tumbleweed at all.”

Charlie rolls her eyes at him. “You’ve seriously never ridden the back of a truck before?”

“Not as, uh, _me_ ,” Peter says pointedly. “Not for fun.”

She grabs his hand and hauls him up. They both plop into the pile of bedding propped up against the tiny slit of a rearview window, through which they can both see Harley and Rose’s matching sandy heads bob and swivel.

“Have some Twizzlers,” Charlie says a beat later. She pulls the package open with a crackle. “Tell me random facts about yourself. Like--what’s it like in the city? Is everybody really as stinky as Harley says?”

Peter shoots her a very particular squinty-eyed look at that, and she throws back her head and barks out a laugh.

And in the span of two seconds, Peter can see, with sudden clarity, just what Harley loves in Charlie. She has this vibrating sort of energy about her, in a way that seems to mirror what Rose might have been like at her age before meeting their dad and growing up and being thrown into life dampened all that into crooked, knowing smiles of soft love and fatigue. Peter notices that Charlie has a Hello Kitty watch on her right wrist--unironically--and the blur of her off-white outfit is actually two separate things, a pale yellow cable cardigan with the sleeves cut short and a chiffon skirt the same color with tiny little kitten-shaped press-on patches. Her black combat boots are also customized with various bedazzlements.

“That’s Harley smelling himself,” is what Peter says. “Also, it’s not _my_ fault there are freaking...superpowered lizards living in the sewers under Central Park. It’s New York.”

“A-freaking-men,” says Charlie around another Twizzler. “Now. Is your suit machine washable or did Tony Stark make it dry clean only because he’s a rich ass bozo?”

\--

“This would suit you,” Harley says. He tosses a mass of flimsy material into the cart, barely held together by the even flimsier transparent hanger.

“Yuck,” says Charlie. She wrinkles her nose. “That reminds me of the thing he bought me last year. Ew, ew, ew.”

Peter suppresses a snort. He remembers the moment so clearly in his mind when Harley used the exact same expression.

“Who?” he asks. He fiddles with the canned peaches in the baby carrier part of the cart and arranges them obsessively in a line.

“Charlie’s ex,” Harley says around a mouthful of banana. “He was an ass. Actually, come to think of it, so were the other three.”

“I’m sixteen, I’m allowed to date assholes and come home crying because I’m young and dumb. Also, he was _the_ ass of them.”

“You can say that again,” Harley says. He replaces the skirt in the cart with a slightly less frilly option, a faded rose pink number. “Seriously. Kissing _Robin_?”

“Robin deserves a kiss,” Charlie says. “She deserves, like--all the kisses. But not _him_. And not when he was dating _me_.”

“Apparently he forgot about that part.”

“Ugh,” Charlie acquiesces. She glances at Peter. “Well, he was Greek, and so was she. So--”

“Oh,” says Peter. “Yeah. Say no more. I get it.”

The girl turns to him curiously, heel squeaking on the white tile. “Wait. You do? Explain.”

“Well--” Peter tugs down the cuffs of his flannel shirt self-consciously. He glances around. “I mean, like, I’m the last person who would wanna subscribe to or, or promote stereotypes, and obviously there’s a lot of exceptions to the kinds of narratives they feed us in the media, but also--like--I’ve met some frat boys who are also, uh, _really frat boys_ , and I don’t usually say that people suck but sometimes they do suck, and...what. What? _What_.”

Harley and Charlie are staring at him, hangers in their hands, in varying states of disbelief and thinly concealed mirth. 

And then a second later, it clicks for Peter. His face floods with warmth.

“Oh. _Oh_. Oh, geez. Fuck.”

He flails around with his arms, as if some random grandma in the entire Rose Hill Walmart will swoop in to his rescue. Harley and Charlie snort in tandem, but they seem to take pity on him. Pete does look like he’s about to dissolve into a puddle of hot embarrassment on the floor, after all.

“You meant Greek as in _from Greece_ ,” Peter mutters through his fingers over his face. “Fuck me. Somebody kill me now.”

“Nope, we leave those kinda thoughts to me,” Harley says flippantly. He tugs Peter’s wrist to make the boy uncover his face. “You’re so uptight. Wow. You’re like--you’re like Tony with too much hair gel and the face of a shiba inu.”

Charlie full-on cackles behind him.

“Shush,” says Harley. “Okay, that’s it, Parker. We’re going noodling tomorrow.”

“We’re going--what?”

“Fishing!” Harley says. “But with your hands. Y’know, get all those knots in your muscles loosened up. You’ll love it!”

\--

Peter does not, in fact, love it.

“I still don’t see why this is called noodling.”

“Hi-yah!” Harley slaps the water, rolls up his left sleeve over his elbow and slips further down the creek. “It’s a Tennessee thing. We Tennesseeans are a godless breed. You should know better than to question it.”

“There are only two things in the world that deserve honest-to-God to be called noodles, Harley, and that’s pasta and those soft styrofoam thingies from the YMCA pool,” Peter complains. He hikes the fold in his jeans higher over his knee and slogs after Harley. “I see neither of those things here. Just mud and trekking around in--in some poor animals’ natural habitat where there are _rocks_ and sharp _thingies_ and being a general all-around-- _disturbance_. Harls. _Harls_.”

“Shh!” Harley whisper-yells at him.

“Oh, right!” Peter throws his hands in the air. “Like the fish can hear us!”

Harley pauses, his back straightening. For one second of pure dread, the center of Peter’s stomach knots in regret. Still, he doesn’t read any tenseness there in the lines of Harley’s shoulders.

After a second too long for the moment to be casual, Harley twists around with a patented roll of his eyes. “You’re such a dork, Parker.”

“’M not,” Peter mumbles.

“Uh-huh.”

“Am not!” Pete insists. “I’m a--I’m a bona fide jock!”

“Right,” Harley drawls. 

Peter crosses his arms over his chest and pouts. “Well, what would you call a superhero who punches criminals and gets stopped in the street to take selfies with?”

“Hm. I dunno.” Harley pretends to think about it. “A ripped nerd who likes silly string and the Beatles.”

Peter scoops up two palmfuls of creek water and flings it clumsily at Harley, missing by an embarrassingly long shot. “This is bullying.”

"Says the--says the bastard throwing water down my back!" the other boy splutters. His face creases in utter mischief before he dives for his own handful of water and splashes Peter dead center in the chest.

Pete's mouth falls open in shock. "Oh, you are _so_ dead, Harley James Keener, I swear on the graves of all my dead parents-- _ow_!"

"Keep up, Web-Ass!"

"For the last time, they do not come out of my ass!" Peter totters after Harley, who's somehow darting through the rocks against the current of the creek on feet light as a gazelle's. "Not--fair--" Peter pants out. "I'm an urbanite. Just a city animal, a--"

"Incoming!" Harley shrieks, interrupting him, and swivels on his heel to come charging straight at Peter and barrel into him with his arms wrapped tight around his torso. Peter yelps, and the two come crashing down, grasping, floundering, half laughing and half screaming and well and thoroughly drenched.

"Sto-ho-hop!" Peter squeaks. "Stop, stop, stop, I surrender, I'm a nerd, I'm a silly string kid, Web-Ass, whatever the fuck you want."

Harley slaps the surface of the water again because he's a child, apparently, and just because he can. A final splash washes over Peter's face, sending him spluttering. Harley sits back on his haunches, smirking, and then finally stretches out a hand to help Peter up.

"Well, fishing stealthily and quietly is definitely out of the question," Peter notes sarcastically, taking Harley's proffered hand and hauling himself to his feet.

"I'm Deaf, Pete, everythin' for me now is stealthy and quiet," Harley jests. He slings a freezing and skinny arm around his shoulder and helps his brother up the incline to a dry spot of grass. Their shoes squelch uncomfortably underfoot.

Peter plops down on the bank with a huff. He turns to Harley with a brow raised.

Harley suddenly scratches the back of his neck with his head hung. He lopes over to join Peter, dropping onto his butt and attempting to cross his legs, but deciding his jeans are too soaked to even try. He gives up, and slides his hands back and forth through the grass blades instead.

"What," he says flatly after a moment of silence. "I am allowed to joke about it, aren't I."

"Yeah, well...yeah." Peter chews his lip. At his side, Harley flops backward with his arms splayed out as if he's about to make snow angels. Peter leans forward, forearms on his knees, so he can catch a better look at him. "It's just...it's the first time you've...done that." He sniffles at the water droplet rolling down his nose. "Joked about it, I mean."

Harley somehow manages a shrug lying down on the ground. His eyes are closed--casually, it seems, but the flickering under his lashes implies otherwise. There's twin streams of droplets inching across his brows and making their way down his temples. Peter nearly wants to reach out and smooth them away for him.

Harley crosses one arm over his eyes. His lips move after a moment. "I've gotta start sometime, Pete."

"Yeah," the other boy agrees.

"It's all that gets me by most days."

"Yeah, I--I know. I mean--same."

Only Harley's mouth is visible now, and it quirks up for a second in unironic amusement.

"I'm--I'm real glad you're starting to," Peter rushes to fill the silence. "I mean, start joking about it. I--well. It just makes me a little worried, I guess. To hear you joke about it, but knowing it's...early."

Harley's forearm shifts over his face, almost impatiently, incredulously. A muscle in his jaw jumps. "It's not too early. What are you--how would you even fucking know if it's early. What the fuck does that even mean."

Peter bites the inside of his cheek, cursing himself internally for pushing the matter. Well, there's no going back now. He draws a shuddering breath. "Your voice," he says quietly. "I can tell by your...voice."

There's something invisible yet trembling about Harley now, something in the way he breathes, perhaps, or in the way he blinks in the cavern of darkness behind the arm that shields his face. Peter almost regrets bringing it up, despite knowing that he would have done the same over and over again if presented with the choice to do things over. Because this is--this is Harley. This is his brother. Nothing else matters, not now. Not here.

Harley gives up the pretense and moves his arm back from his eyes at last. He lays it across his stomach instead and lies there, quieting the hitch in his lungs, and he turns his gaze resolutely to the distance where the creek babbles and a warbler raises a halting courtship call to the skies.

And then he sits up.

"I've been deaf for some time," he says suddenly. It sounds accidental, almost as if he never meant to utter it.

Peter stares at him. 

"Don't," Harley says, eyes wide, and locked on Peter's. His lips are comically white. "Don't say anything. Don't--tell Tony."

"Tell Tony _what_? I don't understand."

Harley gulps. "You know how Dr. Carp said I only had brain damage to the right side of my noggin from the impact?"

Peter nods. He knows where this is going--he's sharp as a whip, and he's filled with ice in his veins, with something not quite fear but its close cousin, unnamed and dreadful and strangling.

"Well, she was right. I did. And that's how I lost my hearin' in that side of my head. But the other--the, the left--" Harley swallows. He rips up a blade of grass and twists it around his fingertip.

Peter moves briefly to pinch the bridge of his nose. Then he unfurls himself a little, scooting closer, only just daring to brush a knuckle over the wet knee of Harley's jeans. "When did you lose your hearing in the left one, Harley?"

Harley's mouth falls open and his jaw pushes to the side. Peter knows that mannerism, he knows that look, because he's done it a thousand times before, in front of Ned or May or Tony or MJ, when he's trying not to cry and all he can do to keep himself together is stretch the tension in his body as taut as it will go.

"When I was seven," says Harley, and he deserves all the fucking Oscars in the world for how evenly his voice comes out.

"Was it an accident?"

One side of Harley's mouth resembles a smile. "You could say that."

"So…" Peter sucks in a breath. "Any reason in particular you didn't get it checked out?"

The other boy huffs out a laugh. He blinks rapidly, in succession. "Uh-huh," he says. "'Cause my dad bashed my head against the fridge and--hit me with his knuckles and--couldn't possibly tell anyone, not my mom, not Charlie, not Dr. White, God no, could you imagine the shitshow that would cause in this little pea-sized town, it's ridiculous, like, you'd think we're all livin' in some shitty Western soap opera on that channel with all the medical ads--"

"Harls," Peter breaks in. He doesn't--he doesn't know. What to say, what to do, how to--process this. He doesn't know. He _doesn't know_.

Harley lurches forward, too fast and jerky for Peter to even think to catch him, and he buries his face, his nose, in the scratchy wet mess of his knees. His hands scrabble at the back of his head, settling on his nape and clawing at the strands of hair there.

"Harley," Peter gasps. He grabs Harley by the wrists and uses a tiny bit of his super strength without meaning to. Without needing to, because all it takes is a moment of Peter's touch, and the other boy wilts in his hands.

"I'm good, I'm fine, I'm fine," Harley breathes into his knees. Still, he doesn't make a move to wriggle out of Peter's grasp. He stays like that, head buried in his lap, hands behind his head, shaking all over with a fractured sort of strength as Peter kneels beside him and grips him with all he's got.

"I'm okay," Harley says again. "Seriously."

"It's okay if you're not."

"I'm _fine_."

"Sometimes you just gotta let yourself not be fine for a minute. That's what Tony told me."

"But I'm so tired…"

"That's okay, Harley. That's okay."

"No. You don't get it. You don't--I'm. I'm so _tired_ of not being okay."

Peter's eyes sting. "Harley," he says, this time because it's the only thing he knows now how to say, the only thing that's permanent anymore. "Harley. Harley. Harley. Harley."

"I'm tired, Peter."

"Harley."

"I thought--I thought it was just a one-off. And then God turns around and decides enough ain't enough."

Peter moves his hands to encircle Harley's shoulders. Harley is not underweight by any means--he's sinewy with muscle in his own right--but to Peter he has never looked or felt smaller than this moment, when he is trying to curl in on himself to disappear into the very depths of the pain he doesn't know how to hold or even how to drown in.

"Come here," Peter murmurs. "C'mere. Harley. Harley."

He holds him. He holds Harley, quivering there in his arms, because he doesn't know how to bear the crack in Harley's voice or the shatter in his heart and his memories, but he'll be damned if he won't try to hold all the pieces of him somehow.

\--  
Three hours later finds them back in the kitchen of the Keeners, Rose breezing out with bobby pins and blown kisses between her teeth, fanny pack already slung over her shoulder. She drops a kiss on top of their heads--each one of them--even Peter who looks about two seconds away from protesting, but has his mouth too full of whipped cream as he sits cross-legged at the rickety dinette and pretends to help Charlie and Harley slice up the lemon pie evenly.

“Be good, be good,” she hollers breathlessly at each of them.

Harley scoops up the car keys and tosses them to her at the door. “Be careful how you go,” he hollers back. 

And with another smile and a raspberry, she’s gone.

Peter’s fingers still in the middle of his futile efforts to get the lemon bits to unstick from the knife. He feels wrong, not because he’s standing here in a tiny kitchen where only Keeners have traipsed back and forth and laughed and cried and made fun of each other--no. He feels wrong because something has just clicked for him, and it’s like he’s stepped over the threshold of yet another snapshot of something so _Keener_. Something he can utter but will never sound the same in his voice.

“ _Be careful how you go_ ,” he mutters, out of respect, probably, because that’s the only way he can imagine himself saying it. “So that’s where Tony got it.”

Charlie steals the knife from Peter to finish the job. Harley stretches, joints popping. “Yup. He found it so funny the first time I said it that he never forgot, I guess.”

Peter has something similar with Tony, he thinks. A hug, every time they say goodbye. Come to think of it, they’ve almost never said the word _goodbye_ to each other, almost as if it has been violently and irrevocably etched from their vocabulary. He wonders--no, he definitely thinks it began after Titan. Prior to then, there had been the occasional hug, sure, and always the smirking _See ya later, kid_ , but after the red-dusted battle on the god-forsaken planet they skipped the goodbyes altogether. And, Peter muses, they have always been a hell of a lot more tactile with each other than Tony and Harley are. Even now he remembers how Harley stiffened that moment that Tony hugged him in the hospital, how the boy hadn’t known what to do with his arms at his sides.

Peter swallows. He pushes back the chair, shaky on its legs, and shuffles over to the pantry. “You guys have lemon ginger tea,” he says a beat later, in surprise.

“Uh-huh,” brother and sister reply, distracted.

Peter declares then that he’s making some, no, he’s making a cup for each one of them, and if they die of artificial lemon flavoring overdose then it sure as hell won’t be a bad way to go.

“Harley hasn’t gotten over his lemon obsession since he was nine,” Charlie says conspiratorially, hopping up on the counter next to where Peter is leaning back on his elbows.

“You’ll get your brain fried,” Harley admonishes her without even having to glance back over his shoulder to know she’s sat dangerously close to the whirring microwave.

Charlie shoots him the bird. Without turning around, her brother returns the gesture with both hands.

Peter snorts inelegantly. At the sound, Harley finally flips his head backward over the top of his chair. “Siblings are built-in telepaths, Parker,” he says matter-of-factly. “Probably why God decided to bash my ears in. I’d be too powerful if I could read minds _and_ hear at the same time.”

“Nope, no, too macabre,” Peter decides. “Gotta work on your stand-up routine, bro.”

“Am I not fulfilling all your dreams of seeing Pete Davidson live?”

“Ew, you’re not nearly deadpan enough. Dream on.”

Charlie giggles at that, grabbing the mugs from the microwave and plopping the tea bags into all three of them. She bobs them up and down in the ripples and steam, and Peter grins at her and follows suit.

“Stop joking about God,” Charlie advises her brother. “Makes you sound like that guy at the singles bar that just won’t shut up about his ex.”

“I swear, I am going to get you up to a John Mulaney on your humor before we leave for New York, if it’s the last thing I do,” says Peter.

“You got less than seventy-two hours,” says Harley. “Good fuckin’ luck.”

Peter sips primly at his tea, then spits it out with a yelp, fanning his tongue as Charlie snickers from her post on the counter. “Ow, ow, ow. Fuck.”

“Suck a duck,” Harley concurs.

“What,” says Peter.

“What,” says Charlie.

“It definitely tastes like froot loops,” Peter points out, without waiting for Harley to explain himself. 

Harley twists his torso fully to lean over the back of his chair. His smile is wolfish. “That’d be ’cause you’re drinking Tony’s Rich People Shit. He heard me say I like lemon Life Savers, _once_ , when I was like, fuckin’ _nine_ , and he bought me a whole bunch. Then started feedin’ me all sorts of lemon shit when I moved into the Tower. Lemon pies, lemon sugar cookies, lemon shakes, lemon--oatmeal--don’t even wanna know what demon he sold his soul to get _that_ abomination--and like, I feel a piece of my soul depart from me every time he comes up with a new Rich Person lemon-flavored product but he looks so _pitiful_ that I can’t just, like, say _no_.”

It’s Peter’s turn to snicker over his mug. “He’s a little confused, but he got the spirit,” he murmurs.

“Life Savers, though,” Charlie sighs. “That’s the real shit.”

Harley wrinkles his nose. “Big bro present. You’re not supposed to be cussing,” he teases.

“Oh, fuck off,” she says, plopping down on the linoleum with her back against the cabinet. “Just tell Ma you didn’t hear nothin’. After all, you’re Deaf.”

The laugh that bubbles out of Peter blindsides him so viciously that he bursts into a hacking cough.

Harley gets up to make a show of thumping Pete on the back, only serving to make matters worse. He reaches around the other boy to snag his mug of now overly-steeped lemon tea and joins his sister on the floor. “This is perfect. This is great,” he complains the whole time. “My life just lends itself as a punching bag for all the Deaf jokes.”

“You could be Drew Lynch,” Peter muses. He moves forward a bit hesitantly, swaying in front of brother and sister on the kitchen floor. Charlie grabs his wrist and drags him down.

“I could be who now?” says Harley.

“YouTube,” Peter says with a wave of his hand. “Later. I think he’s more your style.”

Charlie pipes up, “Like I always say, make fun of your own insecurities so nobody else can.”

“When did you say that. I have literally never, ever, not once, heard you say that in your life,” says Harley.

There’s a beat of silence. And then Peter’s breath rips out of him in another cackle at the same time Charlie says with the long-suffering air of a Victorian mother, “That’s because you’re _Deaf_ , Harley James Keener.”

They bicker back and forth like that, basking in the glow of the lazy sun as it takes its time setting behind the horizon, and the last peachy rays of light filter into the kitchen where they’re seated. The linoleum is bumpy and horridly uncomfortable under their butts, and they gripe about their numb asses every five minutes, but nobody feels like moving, so they finish their tea and their pie like that pretending to be tired of everything but knowing that each of them tastes that same inkling of something new, something different. Something of the future.

The sun has completely set and the kitchen is bathed in lavender and baby blues when they find themselves blinking drowsily in the silence. The quiet settled gently over them at some point after the sixteenth Tik Tok Charlie showed them. She clicks her phone on one more time, aimlessly checking the time. It’s nearly nine.

“The quiet is nice sometimes,” Harley breathes.

On either side of him, Charlie and Peter still. Peter wonders if they’re both thinking the same thing: that Harley talks in riddles more often than he lets on, in metaphors and double symbolisms, and right now feels like one of those moments.

“Yeah,” says Peter after a while, because Charlie seems a little too stunned to respond.

“I’m gonna miss this.”

“You could stay longer,” Charlie says.

“I know,” he says. “I know you’ll always be around. You and Ma.”

 _And you have me_ , Peter adds to himself. _You have me when you’re back in New York_. But now is not the time to say that.

“It’s the quiet things I’m gonna miss,” Harley goes on. The swallow is audible in his voice. 

Peter furrows his brow. “How’s that?”

“The quiet noises. The crickets. The lights buzzing. Ma choppin’ the tomatoes and cussin’ under her breath because she thinks nobody’s in earshot, and she hates cutting tomatoes, she thinks they’re an alien breed of vegetable sent to dull all our knives.”

Charlie gives a tiny little snort at that.

“Tires on gravel,” Harley adds. “Pages flipping. Pancakes. Butter in the pan--grass--wind--pencil scratches and--yeah. Yeah.”

Peter knocks his knee against Harley’s, and Charlie does the same. Harley knocks back.

“Everything’s just really loud with these,” Harley says, half-apologetically, as he unfolds his arms to reach up and tap the hearing aid hooked around his right lobe. “There’s no...like...sophisticated volume filter on these things.”

Oh. _Oh_ , Peter thinks.

“Guitar strings,” Harley tacks on. “Guitar strings. Hell, even your ukulele, Charlie. Things that--things that matter. Things that make a difference.”

Peter should say something, he thinks. He should--think of something to encourage Harley, something he can fix his eyes on that still remains in his future. Remind him of all the things he still has, all the things he _can_ hear. But he doesn’t open his mouth or interrupt, because something inside him tells him that this is Harley grieving. This is the picture of his brother slowly naming each and every thing he will have to learn to say goodbye to, as the years pour out onto the path ahead of them.

And it’s that tiny realization, silent as a pin but heavy as an earthquake, that stops up Peter’s throat and prevents him from uttering anything that resembles _I’m sorry_.

After some breaths and more seconds watching the blue drift around them, Charlie says, “I don’t want you to leave.”

“Told you I can stay longer.”

“That’s--not what I meant,” says Charlie.

_I don’t want you to leave. We don’t want you to leave. Leave yourself, your happy self. This happy, hopeful, messed-up earth._

Somehow, Peter understands. And a few heartbeats later, so does Harley.

“Hey there, Delilah, don’t you worry ’bout the distance,” Harley whispers. Off-key. But always on the beat.

“Hey there, Delilah, don’t you worry ’bout the distance,” Charlie hums back.

“I’m right there if you get lonely,” Harley continues, voice gaining strength. “Give this song another listen, close your eyes...listen to my voice, it’s my disguise…”

Charlie joins in, about two steps higher on the pitch. “I’m by your side,” she warbles.

“Oh, it’s what you do to me,” they sing together. “Oh. It’s what you do to me. Oooh, it’s what you do to me-e-e. Oh. It’s what you do to me, it’s what you do to me…”

Harley’s voice cracks. Nobody makes a joke about it. He pushes on, rougher and slower than he sounds normally. It hits Peter just then that the last time he heard Harley sing that refrain was over a comm, days and days and--eons ago. He heard the spring in Harley’s step, then. He heard the irreverent lilt in Harley’s voice and the clever trill in his notes. The way Harley seemed to love the song and laugh at it at the same time, and how he never seemed to truly understand the lyrics until today.

And then the pain hits Peter dead center in the chest. He doesn’t understand it. Can’t explain it. He unfolds his arms to shove the knuckles of his right fist up against his teeth, to stop the noise that might escape, maybe, or to press a bandage to everything that’s suddenly spilling out of him. He can’t help but feel that he has intruded on another moment that he has no business being witness to: him, with all his insensitivity and his bumbling way of being helpful, and his science brain and Parker ways and downright _orphanness_.

But Harley. Harley, Harley. He doesn’t let the thought fester in Peter’s brain, because he scoops up Peter’s left hand in his and squeezes it, and he keeps right on singing until the crickets come out and the kitchen goes black.

\--

Rose wakes up Harley at the butt crack of dawn. He’s tangled up in the sheets on the couch with Peter’s foot shoved against his face, which is apparently how they all fell asleep last night in the living room in front of the TV and the rickety stand fan.

“Hey,” Rose whispers. “Shh. Don’t wake them up. Come on, get up, quickly. We’re going out.”

“Huh? Wha’?” Harley kicks at Peter gently, clocking him in the jaw, in the process of detangling himself from his brother. Considering that Pete sleeps like metamorphic rock in a coma, it isn’t difficult for Harley to stand up on wobbling legs like a foal and stretch without disturbing the drooling teen at the other end of the sofa. He scoops up his hearing aids from the coffee table and pops them on.

“Go shower or--splash water on your face or whatever it is you stinky teens do these days,” Rose says. “I’ll go do my hair. We’re goin’ out, just you and me.”

“But work.”

“I got today off. Don’t tell the others, okay?” At Harley’s look of suspicion and...vague guilt, Rose softens. “It’s just the two of us for today. I don’t hardly get to spend time with my big baby anymore.”

“Okay,” says Harley. “Okay.”

They end up downtown, or whatever tiny line of shops Rose Hill calls a downtown, and Rose buys him four whole scoops of lemon and blueberry froyo from that one place that was always just theirs. He wheedles her into getting something for herself, and she eventually caves and orders coffee flavor with a scoop of birthday cake because she may be a waitress at the fanciest place in town, but her palate has always been about as refined as Peter Parker’s.

“Let’s talk,” Rose says at last around a mouthful of her abominable creation. 

Harley pauses midlick. This is precisely what Charlie was saying when she said their momma gets like...that. No beating around the bush.

“We are talking.”

“Nope, we’re eating froyo and _you’re_ talking about Charlie’s paintings because you don’t want to talk about what it is that’s really on our mind. C’mon, baby. You’ve always been a brick around me, but I know there’s a big ol’ softie deep down in there.”

“I’m not gonna start cryin’ on cue just because you think I’m supposed to be vulnerable right now. I’m not in drama club anymore,” Harley says, with just the softest hint of sourness. She forgives him instantly for it. She understands.

“You still might,” she says lightly, instead. “We’ll see. So. Tell me what’s swimmin’ up in that head of yours.”

“No thoughts,” he grumbles. “Head empty.”

“No,” she says. “No, no head empty. You’ve got a huge head, full of huge ideas. Even Tony Stark knows that.”

Harley lowers his cone. “What good are my huge ideas, anyway?”

The spoon clatters against Rose’s teeth as she considers that. “He’s not in our lives anymore, kiddo.”

“I never said he said that.”

“But he did.”

“He didn’t--”

“Not in those words, sure.” She steals a scoop from the back of Harley’s blueberry chunk. “But he acted like that. And I...I can’t be sorry enough for that.”

_What is it with you kids and guilt complexes these days?_

Harley snorts softly to himself.

“It’s in my head,” he says softly. “Especially after...last semester and...this.”

“That’s like saying that other people like you don’t have a chance at life anymore.”

“I know what it sounds like. I know,” Harley says, with an edge to him. “I’m not--talking about them, Ma. They’re all good, they’re great. Kudos to them. I don’t mean to say they’re not capable. But--”

His mother folds her hands in front of her on the purple wire table. It stings under her fingertips from the heat of the sun. “But what?”

“I’m just talking about me. Me, not them. I’m--I guess I’m one of them, so I should be saying _us_ , but--I can’t see myself there yet. I’m not you, Ma. I’m not Charlie. I sure as hell ain’t Peter. But I’m also not...Helen Keller or Lou Ferrigno or…”

“Them,” Rose finishes for him softly.

“Yeah,” he replies, eyes on the table. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry. That wasn’t a fair argument on my part.”

He flicks his gaze up at her. Settles on her lips, reads the shape of the words around her mouth. “It’s okay, Momma. This is all new. You don’t...have to know how to deal with this.”

“Guess not. But it’s my job to try my damnedest.”

Harley’s eyes water. What is up with him and the waterworks these days?

Rose reaches into her pocket and clicks on her phone to show him the screen. “Look, I wasn’t sure if it’s weird or insensitive if I show you this, but I was on Pinterest during my break yesterday…”

“Oh, geez,” Harley chuckles around a wet sound.

“Just take a look. Lemme know what you think.”

He takes the phone from her dutifully. On the screen is a new board that Rose has pinned, titled _For Peachy_. And right under it are photos, a dozen, maybe, of people with tiny tattoos behind their ears.

Harley gapes.

He feels like his brain is breaking. Sure, Rose has never been a very traditional mother, but-- “You said the day me or Charlie got a tattoo, you’d bathe us in tomatoes and salt.”

“Yes, well, that was before he left. A lot has changed since then.” Rose tacks on a smile at the end. It looks too real for Harley to disbelieve. She holds it there on her face for a moment longer, and then suddenly she slips off her denim jacket and hikes up the hem of her babydoll top. “Here, take a look.”

“Ma, I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to strip tease in front of Mrs. Boggs’ antiques place--”

“Pshh. Child. Just look.”

He does. There on his mother’s skin, a bit above her left hip, is a simple ink rendering of a little three-pronged cactus with a crown on top. It doesn’t look fresh.

“When did you even get this? What?”

“When you were thirteen.” Six years after her husband left, then. “I just decided something needed to change, I suppose. I needed to start...coming to grips with things. And start embracin’ ’em, instead of just surviving.” She drops the edge of her shirt back down.

Harley shoves his hands under his thighs. “So why a cactus?”

Her mouth twitches upward as if in an inside joke. She shovels the last spoonful of froyo into her mouth and pushes her cup back. “He made me feel less of a woman, even before he left, and...wow. This is so weird to be talking about with you.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, yeah. I don’t really know how to explain it, but basically a chunk of my womanhood was tied to him. My identity was tied to him. He was my first, my only, my--you know.”

Harley knows. He nods.

“I woke up in the dead of night with a realization,” she goes on. “Your sister was at summer camp. You were doin’ your homework. I said to myself, before I am a woman, before even being a mom or...wife or, all those things, first I’m a human.”

Harley doesn’t think he quite gets it, but his mother is talking about something that makes that special light in her eyes glint again, and it’s that, that small hint of something, that quiets the questions on his tongue. Because just hearing her talk and basking in her candidness--that’s enough. More than enough.

“And a boss at it,” she adds, ducking her head a little. “Hence the crown.”

“Did it help you?”

She reaches forward slowly to cup his cheek. “More than I thought it ever could.”

He blinks. Leans into her touch. He’s missed this, so, so much. He’s missed being held without pity.

“It might or might not for you,” says Rose. “But I just want you to be happy. I want you to be...you.”

And fuck it, so does he.

\--

When Harley steps out of the revolving doors of JFK and into Tony’s arms a month later, he feels a year older and a head smaller, and a mouthful of Keenerisms wiser in a way he never thought he ever could be.

“Look at you,” Tony says. His chest rumbles under Harley’s cheek. “Look at you. Look at you.”

Harley is loath to pull away, but Tony leans back with his hands on the kid’s shoulders to really look him up and down. Harley’s face folds into a free smile. “I don’t know, man, you’re the one lookin’. Tell me what you see.”

“A goober,” Tony says decisively. “You got _tan_. Jesus. Maybe I should make my way back down to Rose Hill sometime. See what’s in their water that makes you kiddos look like YouTube stars.”

“Sorry Rose Hill keeps being sucky for you.”

Tony makes a face. “It does, doesn’t it? Discovered I had PTSD while I was there, then saw your mom behind bars in your dinky lil precinct down there. Fun times.”

“You should come over for Christmas. You, Mrs. Potts, Pete--even Happy, I guess, I’m not feelin’ picky at the moment.”

“My ten-foot Christmas tree just not cutting it for you?”

“Yuck,” says Harley matter-of-factly. “You and your bombastic displays of wealth.”

“Ouch, actually.” Tony slings an arm around Harley’s shoulder. Harley stumbles into step with him, his brain taking some time to catch up with the situation. Tony’s arm around his shoulder--touching--this. This is good. They’ve never done this before, never as freely, but it’s good.

“So I was looking into NYU,” Tony goes on casually. He pulls open the passenger door of the Audi for Harley.

Harley stands rooted to the asphalt, uncomprehending. “NYU.”

“Sure,” the man says. “Artsy school. Beautiful location, super close to all the hallmarks of your trade. Cinema. Theater. Those--singing people--”

“Broadway,” Harley fills in for him dryly.

“Yes. That type of nerd. I knew that. Look, I’m not saying do this or don’t do this, but...I picked up some information here and there.” A whole freaking laundry load of information, apparently, if the pile of brochures in Tony’s pocket when he pops open his suit is anything to go by. Harley covers his mouth with the back of his sweatshirt-covered hand to stop up the emotional little giggle that might escape him now.

“Talk to this woman, uh, what’s her name--” Tony snaps his fingers. “Right. Sally. In the Moses Center for Students with Disabilities. Give her a call or, uh, shoot her an email, I gave her a heads-up you may or may not be interested. She’s super helpful.”

“Uh-huh,” is all Harley can say behind his hand, because he doesn’t trust his voice right now with more than two syllables.

“And, also...I dunno if this is pushing it, but you’ve been gone for twenty-eight days and I put together this abominable list of dad things I need to do with you. There’s only so many hours in a day, so we’re gonna have to start grinding as soon as we get back, young man.”

“Yeah? What sorta things?”

“I’m not supposed to--oh, what the hell.” Tony rolls his eyes at the boy. “A tour of all the new installments at the Tower is in order, for starters.”

Harley knows about this. Peter has been texting him photos almost daily of all the little renovations Tony’s been doing. Peter does that for him, because he knows how much Harley hates surprises, and he also knows Tony deserves better than for people to just assume what he’s been doing in the midst of his hyperfocused radio silence.

Harley remembers the pictures of the light-powered doorbell over the doorway of his room, and over the doorway of every room, really. The new strobe light alarm clock, and the second option hooked up to the bed with gentle vibrations. The newly designed watch, sitting nestled somewhere in a box in Tony’s pocket right now, probably, with speech-to-text functionality and 360-degree view surveillance.

He doesn’t really need all these things. Harley knows, and he’s adapted so, so well already. If he were any other person, he might even be offended at all this. All the effort to make these changes and highlight differences. But he knows Tony. He knows the man means well, Christ, he means the _best_. And he’s never been the best at talking about feelings--much less with his kids--but he has money, and for all of Harley’s snide jabs at him for being rich, his wealth is one of the few things that Tony can use to actually show how much he cares. To make up for the language he doesn’t know how to speak because nobody ever taught it to him.

“ASL classes. Pete was telling me you’re super interested in that lately. There’s still time to enroll before the summer ends, anyway. Oh! And hearing aid shopping,” Tony continues. “Don’t get me wrong, those babies are okay. They’ll always be special. Maiden voyage and all that. But it’s time for something new, something with color, maybe?”

Harley looks at him. They’re still standing like idiots on either side of the open car door. The window is half-rolled between them, and Harley runs his hand along the edge as he gazes straight at Tony. He sees pools of care in those brown eyes, and lines of worry, lines of laughing, lines of life and living all up and down his face. Salt and pepper sprinkles in his goatee. Warmth, gentle and nervous, like waves of lavender. Harley thinks of the purple tabletop where his mother folded her hands and looked straight at him, and told him he was neither _us_ nor _them_ , but simply himself.

And purple reminds him of that. Calm, wise, powerful, grounded. Rose. Tony. Everybody who ever truly loved him.

It reminds him to be himself, and no one else.

“Purple,” he says. “I want purple.”

Tony’s eyes crinkle with joy. Neither of them say it, but the man knows the second it took for Harley to respond meant that his answer actually means something.

“Yeah, Flannels, purple it is,” Tony says softly. “C’mon, we’re--wait. What is that?”

“What’s what?”

“That.” Tony reaches over the car door to grab the side of Harley’s head and turn it to the side. In the summer light, the corner of Harley’s tattoo peeks out behind his ear, right beside the edge of his hearing aid. It’s the first design Rose picked out: the megaphone symbol for volume, with a tiny _x_ beside it.

“I’ve got it on both,” Harley informs him. He shifts so Tony can see his left ear this time.

Tony’s mouth falls open just a little. He pushes his jaw to the side. “Huh,” he murmurs. “Huh. You--you’re just full of art, aren’t you?”

Harley raises his gaze to him, blindsided.

Nobody’s ever quite put it like that. Not around him.

The next thing either of them knows, Harley has run around the side of the car door and straight into Tony, wrapping his arms around the man’s torso as tight as they can possibly go.

“Thank you,” he whispers into Tony’s chest.

“Hey,” Tony whispers back. “Any time.”

**Author's Note:**

> The "he was Greek" joke was lifted almost word for word from a super embarrassing late night conversation I had with Fran. Needless to say, I was Peter in that situation. Someone end me now.
> 
> I'm just really emotional and a little nervous posting this, but more than anything I'm excited to know everyone's thoughts. I'm sorry if I take a while replying to everyone, because the semester has gotten hectic and literally everything is due next week, but I promise you I will grin and/or cry (definitely both) over each and every bit of feedback I get from you. What do you think? Which part did you like best? Which part hurt you the most?? 
> 
> As always, I love you and thank you for your support in this fandom <3 -kaleb
> 
> P.S. The fic where Tony bailed Harley and Rose out of jail and Harley meets Peter for the first time is [These Angels See the Light](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22183174).
> 
> P.P.S. I *HIGHLY* recommend listening to more of Talia Lahoud's music on YouTube. She breaks my soul in all the best ways possible. :)))
> 
> muh tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> muh insta: kc.barrie
> 
> [pinterest moodboard for this story](https://www.pinterest.com/kcbarrie/writing-moodboards/talk-to-shooting-stars/)  
> [pinterest moodboard for the keeners](https://www.pinterest.com/kcbarrie/writing-moodboards/the-keeners/)


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